Annie Brown says Lisa Nandy, centre, should speak to Clara Ponsati, inset left, about the lessons to be learned from Spain before preaching about how the Labour party should deal with Scotland (Image: Getty/UGC)

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Those who left Scotland and the UK to fight fascism in Spain’s civil war must be spinning in their graves after Lisa Nandy’s ill-judged remarks on the issue of Catalan seperatism.

The Labour leadership hopeful argued that a “social justice agenda” could overcome “divisive nationalism” as in Catalonia, failing to mention those beaten by police for the “crime” of exercising a right to vote in a referendum.

Clara Ponsati is a political fugitive in Scotland because she supports independence for Catalonia (Image: Daily Record)

Nine political prisoners rot in Spanish jails serving sentences totalling almost a century and hundreds of ordinary people have been arrested and brutalised.

In Scotland, we have a political fugitive, Clara Ponsati, from “democratic” Spain exiled to our doorstep.

Political persecution is not “social justice” but an outrage which should not have slipped Nandy’s mind.

Armed Spanish riot police remove demonstrators who support a Catalan nation state in Barcelona in October last year (Image: REUTERS)

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She also failed to mention the police batons unleashed only three months ago by the current “socialist” Spanish government on those protesting the sentencing of the Catalan separatist leaders.

Yesterday, Nandy put another nail in the coffin of the corpse that is Labour in Scotland because, regardless of their views on independence, Scots recognise that civic nationalism here is driven by a sense of being disenfranchised and a desire for social justice.

Wigan MP Lisa Nandy says Labour should look to Catalonia to learn lessons about the way to deal with 'divisive nationalism' (Image: Getty Images)

There is not the fascist connotations she infers. If Nandy really wants to decry pernicious nationalism, she should condemn the Spanish state and the blinkered refusal of the unionist movement to grant IndyRef2.

Scots recognise democratic movements of any hue can be disagreed with but should not, as Nandy implied, be quashed.